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Oh the things I have learned and would do differently

Throughout the years I've adopted things and habits and creature comforts, what have you. And it seems as the world continues towards increasing Entropy (see Lehminger's Intro to Biochemistry) there is an ever increasing amount of tools for me to use, adopt and discard.

In this document/post let me detail the use of some past ones and some of my most recent loves.

Current

Skill building

While most of the following are skill building, there are significant efforts that I take to try and build physical skills to reduce frustration and always keep learning

Typing

I am so frustrated with the speed I type. I used to type at 65 wpm with my right hand doing almost everything incorrectly. Now I correctly touch type, at 70 but it was a trek to get here thanks to:

typing.com

By far the best site I've used to provide instruction for me to relearn how to type and how to put words and letters onto the screen.

Monkey Type

Monkeytype is minimalistic and a great way to just practice typing for like 15 minutes a day. I can't wait to get so fast that I will be thinking faster than I write.

TypeRacer

Some healthy competition is good for you. I tend to only come in 2nd-3rd

Social Skills

Talking and dealing with people. It is good to make what is rare and difficult, like asking things from other people, more regular to fight off the stigma within your head. I need to consistently remind myself its okay to ask for help or to confront issues and get things fixed. Asking things is not bad, its literally part of living in a community.

Knowledge

The books I have been reading these days are :

Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry eighth edition by by David L Nelson

Watch out this link will frequently stop working (libgen)

Deep Learning In Python or the holy grail

This is a banger

Godel, Escher and Bach Print Edition

I dont like reading pdfs unless it is a textbook, so this one is on paper. It's a hefty boi...

Reading/Document creation

Obsidian markdown editor and pdf reader

If you put your mind to it and curate the shit out of your obsidian, it literally becomes addicting. I do not want to put this shit down. At all ever. And everything looks so clean and good it looks so amazing and writing and taking notes its almost like we were always meant to use this.

PDF++ and everything else Ryota Ushio has designed

These plugins make obsidian worth every free penny. I kinda wanna buy the obsidian app so I can have all my files on the go too. But i dont know.

Language learning

Anyone who knows me knows that I love learning languages. On the roster is:

  • never forgetting my french
  • Chinese
  • Urdu
  • Vietnamese

To build my vocabulary I use

AnkiWeb Flashcards and so much more

This is irreplaceable. Anki feels by far the best way to learn, and its a community that helps teach you! There are so many decks online at anki web decks and its just an amazing thing overall. I bought the phone app so I can do it on the subway when I'm not using Duolingo or reading

Duolingo Pro

Its not me, my brother bought it so I use it now I guess.

Coding Tools

vscode

the best for everything hands down. mfs be like oh emacs, oh vim. I ask: do you hate yourself. Even if I have quick terminal editing I use nano. wtf is wrong with you. Also vs code is so lightweight for its functionality, and are you kidding me I can just cd into a directory and then code . open that shit up like its christmas day?! please tell me something smoother than that.

And then I get a beautiful darkmode or sepia editor? WITH PLUGINS that make my code so much easier to handle. Not only that but fuck yeah Im using the vscode terminal. It doesn't feel wrong. it loads my venv as soon as I open without having to source venv/bin/activate it... If its more than one file I code . it without a glance.

oh my zsh for all things terminal

I havent gotten into ghostty or whatever the new fad is. But I do love my shell and my z shell looks so fucking nice because I use oh my zsh. It's clear, everything has its color, and the git problems are that much less annoying to deal with because of it. My aliases are so easy and I could not live without my la as a standin for ls -a

Programming

Python

uv as a package manager:

Oh the things that you can do with uv... From creating web-apps like its nothing to managing packages and dependencies like its a node folder.

While I was originally very skeptical of the use of it. I come from a long lineage of learning as Python 3 was built out, sticking to my trusty pip, python3 -m venv and manual pip freeze > requirements.txt

now I shed my blade for this much bulkier one, and this one has a lock file that is automatically created... While I still love the ease of use of the commands that begin with

mkdir Proj/[project]
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install numpy

I still understand the utility and ease of a quick

uv init [project]
uv add numpy

oh and im sure launching to pypi will be like nothing.

by golly this guy is wicked fast

python anywhere Flask deploy server

What is essentially Vercel but Python and I learned it first. With a simple email (I have like 10), you can host your own website for free that you can make with flask. The one caveat I found is if you want to be writing any code for some sort of clustering algorithm then its best if you just write it yourself without downloading the package. I definitely find that the packages take quite a bit of space on the server. Lmao this isn't lovable where you can just host your shit on github without caring about the space.

That is not to say that I don't use github to transfer the code from my computer to the pythonanywhere servers. I do do that, haha doodoo...

Keras

duh.

JavaScript

Nextjs Framework for web dev

I started getting pissed that noone wanted to host my site well enough or yaknow be able to just use a repo I make on github and then anything but pages HOLY SHIT

Plus its always a bonus if I can use github and connect it to an SQL database, and even more pluses if I use something I've never really touched before. I want to always grow yktv

shadcn/ui pretty components, quick slop

God its wonderful when things just work. Which they never really do. But fuck it, builders gotta build lmao and im not gonna wait for the things to just work. By far a very buggy library. but its our component library (its not even a component library its just code i guess.)

anyways its pretty and easy to use through npx, goes almost native on Nextjs

Tools

Claude AI assistant

From writing slop to writing readmes, could be considered code. I would never trust anyone besides Claude to ensure that I'll get a ton of words that mean something.

I also use in many ways, check me out on twitter if you wanna see.